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I don’t usually dread Mondays. I like fresh starts and the beginning of each week feels that way to me.

Not this one - both my husband and I are going on business trips. It took a bunch of juggling to make sure that our trips didn’t overlap. I moved several meetings and he convinced several colleagues who are traveling with him to go on different dates. Since I am taking the bus (to NYC) we decided that my trip should be first. My husband is flying so there is a chance of the plane being late or canceled and him coming home too late for me to leave for my trip. (My parents do live close by but they work and while we could ask one of them to take off to cover for us one night or morning, I prefer not to do that.)

Making sure our business trips didn’t collide felt like a small triumph, until I realized that I come back at midnight on one day and my husband leaves at 6 am the next day. Fun. I usually come from these trips looking and feeling like a door mat which has been stepped on a thousand times and having my husband deal with drop off the next day is a little luxury I’ve come to enjoy. I know, I know, it’s really not a big deal, and a million single working moms (my heroes, truly) deal with business trips and the ensuing exhaustion all the time, but still, I am whining little.

I don’t leave until Tuesday but I spent a few hours today making dinner for the week so that I don’t have to do it at 2am after I come back. I’ve been known to cook at all hours of the night (if you’re wondering why, read this), so I am feeling proud of myself for doing it ahead of time. Aside from that I am not sure what else we can do to make this week go easier than it promises to. We’ve done this two-business-trips-in-one-week routine before and it wasn’t the most enjoyable experience. (That one did involve a late plane and a missed flight, so we’ve learned a lesson.)

Do business trips make you anxious? How do you and your partner juggle business trips? If you’re a single mom, what’s your business trip routine?

One comment so far...

[...] GREAT excuses. I’ve had two business trips in the last two weeks and my husband had one; this business trip collision meant that all non-essential things besides making sure we were all fed and where we needed to be on [...]